2017.09.19 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness, Oxford University Press, 2016, 248 pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199669651.
Reviewed by Luca Vanzago, University of Pavia, Italy
The book deals, as the title explicitly states, with the phenomenology of illness. The main aim is to analyze illness as something whose experience is a universal and substantial part of human existence. At the start, Carel claims that illness, like death, raises important philosophical issues. But unlike death, illness, and in particular the experience of being ill, has received little philosophical attention. The reason for this neglect might reside in the fact that illness is often understood as a physiological process that falls within the domain of medical science, and is thus outside the purview of philosophy. But Carel suggests that the experience of illness has been wrongly neglected by philosophers in general, philosophers...
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